Various kinds of database have been in use since the early days of electronic computing. In order to store and retrieve data from the database, a database management system (DBMS) is used. The database management system is a set of software programs that are linked to one or more database. As electronic commerce has gained prevalence, organizations have become increasingly dependent on database management systems for processing ever larger volumes and more critical nature of electronic data. A failure of these database management systems can potentially result in a huge loss of money. Moreover, loss of such data may lead to dissatisfaction of customers and depreciate the market value of the organization. Hence, it is critically important to ensure high reliability of such database management systems.
The challenge faced by the operators and system administrators of such database management systems is how to detect and diagnose performance problems with the database management system in a timely manner, before the problem reaches a critical stage and results in a system failure.
The performance of the database management system depends on various operating parameters such as memory usage, CPU time, and caching. The operating parameters govern effective usage of the database management system. One approach to address the aforementioned problem is to convert historical data of the operating parameters into meaningful recommendations and warnings of the performance of the database management system. Some of the current database management systems, such as Oracle, only provides current trend with low reliability.